Ten Lifestyle Group Plc (TENG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

What we're going to do is rattle through the highlights, talk about the -- reminder of the business model. Now we'll go through that fairly quickly because everyone on this call understands that very well. Talk about the financial results for the 6 months. Alan will go through those. I'm going to talk specifically about the tech update and what we're working on around AI and the platform, and then we'll discuss outlook, and then we'll have time for Q&A afterwards as well. So I am very pleased with the fact that we've got record adjusted EBITDA, both on an absolute level and on a margin level. And that's even more pleasing when it's adjusted for constant currency. But just in itself, it's record EBITDA. We've got our third quarter of positive PBT. Again, that's good news for the business. And we've got net revenue in line with H1 2023. So I would have liked that to have been higher, but it is up at constant currency, albeit not at the same levels of growing at 35% for the last couple of years. We've won some good contracts that bode well for the future and some contract extensions and active members are up 15% and continue to grow. And all of that has been happening as we continue to invest into tech proposition and AI and content. Now our mission remains the same. We want to become the world's most trusted service platform, both in terms of trusted by our members where -- for whom we deliver travel, dining, tickets and various retail offers and events, but also working behind global brands that use us to achieve their own customer metrics. So for our members, it is about the big 4: Travel; dining; entertainment, which is music, theater, sports and so on; and then luxury retail, helping people buy some of the luxury items, but also in retail or things like organizing flowers for somebody. It can be from that all the way up to buying a car or even helping people buy a house and so on. Experiences and events span the 4 areas and inspiration, the content that while editorial experts create, they also span those 4 areas, travel, dining, entertainment and luxury retail. And our corporate clients account for most of our revenue, and they pay us to look after their most valuable customers. Now this page is well known to many of you. There are a couple of new names we put on here, Standard Chartered in Asia is a new brand that we're working with, and Emirates in the Middle East is a new brand that we just announced a couple of weeks ago as well. And there are lots of familiar names there. And what we want to do with those clients is retain them and grow them. And we have -- until very recently, we've retained 100% of our corporate clients over the last 4 years. We did recently -- or we have got sight of a contract that we're going to lose, which reduces our contract retention level to 96% of our material contracts in this year. But the reason why these brands pay us to look after their customers is that we help them with retention. We help them with acquisition, and we help them make more money from their customers. So in the case of private banks and wealth managers and card companies, a lot of that's around retention, but also when people use our service, they're more likely to spend on card. They're more likely to grow the AUM they've got with the bank. They're more likely to have a halo effect, for instance, a higher Net Promoter Score and genuine advocacy for the bank or the wealth manager and it's higher that level of advocacy, the more that people engage with concierge. And the investment case remains very similar to how it has been in recent years, which is we've got a huge market opportunity. Both the immediate market, we are today less than 0.2% of the customer loyalty market in financial services. But we're also part of the even bigger market of helping high net worths organize their lives. In the world of lifestyle concierge, we're the market leader, we win the contracts that come up. We are far more likely to win those than anybody else. And I would say, we've got very strong retention, and we're growing well both in the high-net worth space, but also in the mass affluent space as well. And one reason for that is that we're the first fully global lifestyle concierge service. Even more important, we're the lifestyle concierge -- embrace technology and invest in technology in the right ways, more than anybody else. And that helps us win, retain and grow clients. And we've got higher service levels, we believe, than any other player in the market as well. And then as we grow and develop, we've got the growth engine. And again, that's a video that everyone on this call, I know, has seen, but the growth engine effectively means that as we develop our business, we get stronger in terms of service levels, our corporate clients invest more with us, we invest more into tech and other aspects of the service that help us become high quality, which continues the virtuous growth engine, but it also -- the investment in tech and proposition and scale also allows us to become more efficient, which drives profitability. Where we are today? Well, we've got a pretty good large member base. We're a business with over [ 60 million ] of people and technology in the business that we invest in every year that allows us to scale. Our proposition is getting better all the time, and we'll explain a little bit more about that later on in this call. We're very strong in financial services, but there's opportunity to grow into other new verticals as well. And we are now profitable on a PBT basis as well as an EBITDA basis. And this year, we do expect to be generating cash, and that will allow the growth engine investment to continue and strengthen the balance sheet. I'd say, I'm not going to go into the growth engine now in great detail, not for this audience. But it's something that when we explain it to people, they do understand it very well. It's a good way of explaining the business. Alan?

Thank you, Alex. I'll just -- a quick reminder of our business model. So if you look at this, this is our revenue model, as Alex said, we make most of our revenue from corporates who pay us to look after our high-value clients. That's 88% of our revenue. And then we earn 12% supplier revenue, which is predominantly travel-related and hotel commissions. I mean our typical contract is long term in nature with often we've agreed minimums in there. We get paid by activity. So it'll be through a high-touch request, talking to an LM either on e-mail, phone or chat or it's self-serve through our digital platform, and that's how we make our revenue on the corporate side. Next slide, Alex. And then when you look at it in terms of the eligible member base, a number of members who can use our service, that has grown over the last few years. The end of '23, it was 2.1 million in our high and very high-value segment, and I'll come back to explain that, total active members as Alex says, up 15% year-on-year. The growth has slowed in H1, but still growing at 356,000 at the end of the year, period just gone. And then the way we look at our -- segmenting our clients, we do segment it being very high, and that's whether it's a private bank, assets under management, premium credit cards or with a retail bank with a credit card on the high segment or the medium segment is through the networks, which is Amex, Visa and Mastercard. So we see a higher penetration of active members in the very high value because they can afford to spend more money with us compared to high or medium. However, the digital mix will be more to the medium because we will push digital first in the medium segment, and so we'll get a different range of penetration and mix. And what does that do? It includes the member journey, we're personalizing content on digital, and we've got AI and chat in behind that as well, delivering efficiencies. As I said, we do get -- in terms of average concierge revenue, just to remind you, we do get paid more by very high-value clients because they can afford to spend more with the clients. And as you can see on this graph, up to 3x of the medium segment. So that's -- whilst, in terms of active members, it's the smallest segment, it generates the most revenue for us. Moving on to our financial results for the period. As Alex said, our net revenue in line with prior year, up 4% on constant currency. Within that, our supplier revenue grow by 15%, up to GBP 3.8 million, and our corporate revenue was in line with prior year. We continue to manage our operating expenses. They decreased by GBP 0.3 million as cost management offset cost inflation, and that generated a record adjusted EBITDA at GBP 5.3 million, up 7% and 10% at constant currency with a record EBITDA margin of 17%. We continue to invest in technology, and that's why amortization has increased to GBP 2.8 million. Now, like said, we maintained a profit before tax in the period. And our usual graph for our net revenue side, as you can see, the impact of FX brought us back a little bit. Net corporate revenue retention at 101%. So the base business didn't go that much in the new period, although we did use new mandates of GBP 0.4 million, and as said supplier revenue up GBP 0.5 million to GBP 3.8 million in the period. And looking at supply revenue, a little bit more detail. As you can see, it's improved since we've come out of COVID and the actual percentage by half year is increasing half year to half year. And as a reminder, our H2 bookings are traditionally higher due to travel seasonality, so that will come in stronger in this half of the year compared to the half just gone. And looking at the breakdown of net revenue and adjusted EBITDA by region, that's Europe, Americas and AMEA. Our European region, net revenue increased by 4%, 5% at constant currency that was driven by both corporate and supplier revenue. And then combining that with operational efficiencies and some FX benefit, adjusted EBITDA margin actually improved to 36% compared to 32% last year. And Americas, actually, net revenue did decrease by 4%, 1% at constant currency, so impacted by FX and also the costs were impacted by FX as well. And we do have some contract setup costs in that region in anticipation of new contracts coming in, in H2. And AMEA, net revenue increased by 3%, it will be 11% at constant currency. That's mostly the Japanese yen movement in the period, but we did improve our EBITDA driven primarily through operational efficiencies in that region. We show this slide every presentation. It just shows the continued investment in our technology, we've invested over GBP 52 million in technology to date. And why do we do that? It's just moving from good to great in terms of investing in the platform, TenMAID, our internal CRM system, the content we produce and then the IT infrastructure and comms that support that. Why do we do that? It grows competitive advantage, and it drives efficiency service levels and revenues, and that's what we see coming through the numbers, especially on efficiency. And lastly but not least, the cash flow. So our operating cash flow in the period. We generated GBP 3.4 million, as related to the PBT we had some drag on working capital because of seasonality, and then we add back our noncash items of share-based payments, depreciation and amortization. The big numbers are investment in intangibles, GBP 3.7 million, which is the continued development in technology. We did receive in the period share option receipts of GBP 1 million in terms of options exercised. We did take some additional loan notes in the period of GBP 1.1 million. That means at the end of the period, we had cash and cash equivalents of GBP 8 million, which is up on last year GBP 7.2 million, slightly down on the year-end of GBP 8.2 million. I'll hand back to Alex now.

Great. Thank you very much, Alan. So a little bit about our technology. This is a very good time to be updating you on that. So as everybody on this call knows, we've got a full travel OTA, which means that members can book online, flights, hotels and cars, and also book tour guides and experiences in market as well. We've got various other things on the platform, a huge amount of very much valued content. You can chat with our lifestyle managers in many markets now using WhatsApp and, in most markets, using a chatbot. We've integrated them with many of our corporate clients' loyalty rewards and points. We've got installments, which is huge in Latin America, it's just the way that things operate. We've got geo-location, stored cards, personalization. And of course, this platform that can operate across many, many brands, many languages, many currencies on a global basis, but with just one platform, albeit one that can be personalized to each individual corporate client. So we've built a lot. Now since the beginning of 2023, the rate of improvement has been even more pleasing. So hotel search has got better. And actually, we're hoping towards the end of this year that we'll get better still. We've added in follow interests. We always had follow artists, which allows people to track whether they're interested in Beyonce or whether interested in the Rolling Stones, you can now say whether you're interested in wine tastings or supercars. And we will then let you know about things that are in that area. We've built in Viator, which allows us to have tour guides and experiences in market all over the world. We've built differentiated dining. What that then means is that corporate clients can have different dining benefits for different demographics, and we can put different dining benefits in front of different corporate partners. We're using AI and translation to radically improve the level of content that we've got in multiple languages at very, very much reduced cost. We've got a lifestyle manager copilot. Again, you will hear more about that in a moment. And we're developing the AI chatbot so that, that actually starts learning from that copilot and that can start discussing and working things through with members. Today, the chatbot is pretty much machine learning rather than pure AI because putting AI in front of our members until it's ready or generative AI rather in front of our members before it's ready would be a mistake. But so far, the results in the lifestyle manager AI copilot are very promising. And we've also put in ESG labels, icons and content because many of our corporate partners want to be promoting ESG and kind of other assets, which talk to their ESG agendas. And then entertainment, ticket self-serve, I'm going to talk about that more on the next slide. The reason we're discussing this, it's a great example about what happens when we digitize things on our platform. So what we have built now, and it's launching in the next few weeks is a tickets functionality on the platform whereby people can -- our members can go to the platform and search a huge variety of public access so that wherever they're going in the world, they can choose, they can look at what's there on the dates they're interested in and book it digitally. So that gives them the full availability of for instance, Ticketmaster is one of the APIs included into that. So you get all of the availability on Ticketmaster, but then also on other APIs as well. However, on top of that, through people like Ticketmaster and through our own Box Office and through the other APIs that we integrate, we also include inventory, which is ring-fenced just for 10 members. So you get everything that's on the Internet through somebody like a Ticketmaster and you get access to inventory, which is not available on the Internet. This way for our members to buy inventory of tickets, which is really useful for them and lots of which is not available on the Internet really does drive customer loyalty, Net Promoter Score, customer retention, customer acquisition and so on. Where we've got availability to buy Taylor Swift tickets or Ed Sheeran tickets or tickets for a particular sports match on our platform that they can't get elsewhere, that's incredibly powerful. And because digital booking is so cost efficient, our corporates are excited about promoting that very heavily. So we get a lot more active members. Once somebody is an active member on a medium-value contract, they're encouraged to carry on using the service digitally. Sometimes they'll use it high touch as well. Where they're high value or very high-value members, they're also encouraged to use the service digitally but also encouraged to use it high touch. And if somebody who uses the service for the first time digitally, who's very high value, for instance, might well also place 3 to 10 high-touch requests in the following year. So it drives digital uptake, but also high-touch uptake where the corporate is willing and keen to pay for that, where the corporate is not willing and keen to pay for that, we drive people to digital. So this is something that we're launching in the coming weeks on digital entertainment. And then as a fast follower across the rest of the year, we've got various other things as well. So dining is the next one where today, you can book availability, which is not available to just users of the Internet. So you can book tables that aren't available online, but we're radically increasing that. So we are hoping and expecting and working towards taking the number of restaurants you can book on our platform from 11,000 -- 11,500 to closer to 60,000. And along with that, to put benefits or access and straight through digital booking for all of those. And again, that will allow our corporates to promote that very heavily, bringing more active members into the service, but also will encourage people to use us for their everyday dining. Today, most of our members use us when they're stuck. They use us for the really difficult restaurants and very often, they use us after they've tried to get a table and failed. Because we'll have better availability and a better range than any one dining API on the Internet, we'll be able to become the everyday booking service for our members as well as for the special occasions at the most difficult restaurants. And that then allows us to scale that up, drive frequency, which drives customer loyalty, but also drive some members to then use us for high touch, again, where they want to -- where the corporate client wants people to use us for high touch, we can then make that available. But they'll only really need to use us for the most complicated requests, but we'll have far higher usage overall. The events modules also being improved so that we can make that more bookable online. We're improving hotel functionality as well. And we're putting more categories into pay with installments in Latin America, and that's something we can roll out into other markets as well. Also at the moment, we're investing in the technology that our lifestyle managers are using. We'll talk about AI in a little bit, but TenMAID that lifestyle managers use all day, every day for organizing requests for members is being improved. We're improving how we manage requests on that. We're streamlining how we take payments from members and how easy it is for members to authorize payments. We're making sure that it's tied in with our workforce management so that we plan our resources more effectively. And again, a 5% difference to how well we manage our lifestyle managers is worth GBP 1.5 million a year to us. So TenMAID version 3 is something, again, we are expecting to launch towards the end of this calendar year. And then increasing member engagement is a result of improving the proposition, but there are some other things outside of the proposition, which are important as well. So content outside of log-in means that we're going to have far more content available for people that don't yet know if they want our service to see more of our service before they register. And all of our research shows that that's going to bring far more members into our platform and into our service. We're also removing log-in friction, so people don't get logged off quite so often. And so that they only need to relog-in when they're actually about to use a credit card and buy. So we keep the data security whilst making more things available and for longer. So we're very excited about what we're doing on our platform and on the TenMAID platform that our lifestyle managers use. But one of the most exciting things in the business is around AI. We've got a short video, a 4-minute video, which we're going to play now, and that will really help explain why we are excited, our business is made for AI, and it's something that we are rolling out inside the business and have rolled out already with some very positive results. [Presentation]

So you can see why we are excited about the impact that AI is already having inside the business. And then as the AI improves and is helping our lifestyle managers more and more and more, then we will increasingly see how we can release that same functionality for our members to use and to self-serve. At least on the medium value contracts in particular and where things -- where requests are predictable and fairly straightforward and risk-free. Now to come to growth, where from here? Well, again, for us, it's about growing existing clients and launching things like the new technologies around dining and tickets and the improved technologies around travel is a major part of that. And then it's also winning new clients. Again, winning new clients gets a lot easier with the point of difference we've got around technology, AI, the platform and TenMAID, and that allows us to win new clients and convert them. And win new clients from existing competitors who have clients, who have contracts already, but also to win white space with new corporate clients around the world. And then winning into new verticals and winning new clients in new verticals as well is something that we expect to be doing more of towards the end of this year. Update on contract developments. So we have grown the number of large contracts by 1, grown the number of medium contracts. Overall, we've won working with Standard Chartered, Emirates Bank in the UAE. We've grown a big contract in the States. So from a medium contract to a large contract. And as a new vertical, we started supporting the top travel consultants who work for GTC in the U.S. to help them provide a broader lifestyle support service to their customers, and that's an interesting new space for us. We also had a change to a framework agreement, and this is where we are losing a large contract. So that's something that we regret because we've not been used to that for the last 4 years, we haven't lost a single medium, large or extra-large contract. However, there are ways that we can mitigate that. So firstly, the framework agreement with this business means that we've got 2 contracts with them. One contract they are retaining, that's been resigned on good terms. But on the other contract as well, we are signposting those members who have been using the service under the brand that we're going to stop working with. And those members can join our private service, and we were planning to relaunch private membership anyway towards the end of this calendar year, and this gives us a huge -- fill up, a huge boost to that opportunity. So with that, prudently, we believe that, that will have a net impact of between GBP 1.5 million and GBP 2.5 million, which will then be mitigated in turn by contracts that we win and contracts that we grow outside of that. So our outlook is that we will -- we have launched the new contracts and are launching new contracts moving forward that will help us develop in H2 of this year and beyond. And we expect that to drive revenue growth, notwithstanding the change in contract that we've just discussed, delivering against our digital road map, including AI, but also TenMAID and the platform will help drive growth as well. And all of those things together, we expect to generate net cash in the second half of the year, along with the seasonality driven by supply revenue. And so we are -- we don't need to change our expectations for the full financial year and looking forward to growth thereafter.